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Malitha Gunawardhana

Publications and source records attributed to Malitha Gunawardhana.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

Multicentre Bi-atrial Segmentation from LGE-MRI for Atrial Fibrillation with a 2D and 3D Framework

Accurate delineation of bi-atrial structures from late gadolinium enhancement MRI (LGE-MRI) is an important prerequisite for structural analysis and future fibrosis-quantification workflows in atrial fibrillation (AF). However, automated segmentation is challenging due to thin-walled anatomy, domain shifts across imaging centres, and limited benchmarking of existing methods. This study presents a two-stage segmentation framework and benchmarking platform for evaluating how ROI localisation, encoder design, 2D/3D dimensionality, and ensemble fusion affect bi-atrial wall and cavity segmentation across multicentre LGE-MRI datasets. The framework integrates 3D localisation and fine segmentation using 2D and 3D U-Net variants with ResNeXt encoders and compares them with convolutional, transformer-based, and state-space architectures. { Evaluation across three independent cohorts assessed accuracy and cross-domain transfer without target-domain fine-tuning. Cavity segmentation transferred more consistently across centres than atrial wall segmentation, while wall performance remained sensitive to domain shift, particularly in the Kobe cohort.} By quantifying how 2D, 3D, and ensemble architectures behave across centres and between walls and cavities, this work provides a reproducible benchmark for future methodological development and clinical validation.

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Performance of Machine Learning Classification in Sonomammogram Images using BI-RADS

This research aims to investigate the classification accuracy of various state-of-the-art image classification models across different categories of breast ultrasound images, as defined by the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). To achieve this, we used 2,945 sonomammogram images for training and 936 images for validation, with the source cohort reported as comprising 1,540 patients. In order to conduct a thorough analysis, we employed six advanced classification architecture families, including VGG19 \cite{simonyan2014very}, ResNet50 \cite{he2016deep}, GoogleNet \cite{szegedy2015going}, ConvNeXt \cite{liu2022convnet}, EfficientNet \cite{tan2019efficientnet}, and Vision Transformers (ViT) \cite{dosovitskiy2020image}, instead of traditional machine learning models. We evaluate models in three different settings: full fine-tuning, linear evaluation and training from scratch. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of our Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system, with a remarkable accuracy of 76.39\% and an F1 score of 67.94\% in the full fine-tuning setting. Our findings indicate the potential for enhanced diagnostic accuracy in the field of breast imaging, providing a solid foundation for future endeavors aiming to improve the precision and reliability of CAD systems in medical imaging.

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Segmenting Bi-Atrial Structures Using ResNext Based Framework

Atrial Fibrillation (AF), the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia worldwide, increasingly requires accurate bi-atrial structural assessment to guide ablation strategies, particularly in persistent AF. Late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) enables visualisation of atrial fibrosis, but precise manual segmentation remains time-consuming, operator-dependent, and prone to variability. We propose TASSNet, a novel two-stage deep learning framework for fully automated segmentation of both left atrium (LA) and right atrium (RA), including atrial walls and cavities, from 3D LGE-MRI. TASSNet introduces two main innovations: (i) a ResNeXt-based encoder to enhance feature extraction from limited medical datasets, and (ii) a cyclical learning rate schedule to address convergence instability in highly imbalanced, small-batch 3D segmentation tasks. We evaluated our method on two datasets, one of which was completely out-of-distribution, without any additional training. In both cases, TASSNet successfully segmented atrial structures with high accuracy. These results highlight TASSNet's potential for robust and reproducible bi-atrial segmentation, enabling advanced fibrosis quantification and personalised ablation planning in clinical AF management.

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CrossVideoMAE: Self-Supervised Image-Video Representation Learning with Masked Autoencoders

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Integrating Deep Learning in Cardiology: A Comprehensive Review of Atrial Fibrillation, Left Atrial Scar Segmentation, and the Frontiers of State-of-the-Art Techniques

Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is the prominent cardiac arrhythmia in the world. It affects mostly the elderly population, with potential consequences such as stroke and heart failure in the absence of necessary treatments as soon as possible. The importance of atrial scarring in the development and progression of AFib has gained recognition, positioning late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) as a crucial technique for the non-invasive evaluation of atrial scar tissue. This review delves into the recent progress in segmenting atrial scars using LGE-MRIs, emphasizing the importance of precise scar measurement in the treatment and management of AFib. Initially, it provides a detailed examination of AFib. Subsequently, it explores the application of deep learning in this domain. The review culminates in a discussion of the latest research advancements in atrial scar segmentation using deep learning methods. By offering a thorough analysis of current technologies and their impact on AFib management strategies, this review highlights the integral role of deep learning in enhancing atrial scar segmentation and its implications for future therapeutic approaches.

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How good nnU-Net for Segmenting Cardiac MRI: A Comprehensive Evaluation

Cardiac segmentation is a critical task in medical imaging, essential for detailed analysis of heart structures, which is crucial for diagnosing and treating various cardiovascular diseases. With the advent of deep learning, automated segmentation techniques have demonstrated remarkable progress, achieving high accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional manual methods. Among these techniques, the nnU-Net framework stands out as a robust and versatile tool for medical image segmentation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of nnU-Net in segmenting cardiac magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Utilizing five cardiac segmentation datasets, we employ various nnU-Net configurations, including 2D, 3D full resolution, 3D low resolution, 3D cascade, and ensemble models. Our study benchmarks the capabilities of these configurations and examines the necessity of developing new models for specific cardiac segmentation tasks.

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How Effective are Self-Supervised Models for Contact Identification in Videos

The exploration of video content via Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models has unveiled a dynamic field of study, emphasizing both the complex challenges and unique opportunities inherent in this area. Despite the growing body of research, the ability of SSL models to detect physical contacts in videos remains largely unexplored, particularly the effectiveness of methods such as downstream supervision with linear probing or full fine-tuning. This work aims to bridge this gap by employing eight different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based video SSL models to identify instances of physical contact within video sequences specifically. The Something-Something v2 (SSv2) and Epic-Kitchen (EK-100) datasets were chosen for evaluating these approaches due to the promising results on UCF101 and HMDB51, coupled with their limited prior assessment on SSv2 and EK-100. Additionally, these datasets feature diverse environments and scenarios, essential for testing the robustness and accuracy of video-based models. This approach not only examines the effectiveness of each model in recognizing physical contacts but also explores the performance in the action recognition downstream task. By doing so, valuable insights into the adaptability of SSL models in interpreting complex, dynamic visual information are contributed.

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Dynamic Position Transformation and Boundary Refinement Network for Left Atrial Segmentation

Left atrial (LA) segmentation is a crucial technique for irregular heartbeat (i.e., atrial fibrillation) diagnosis. Most current methods for LA segmentation strictly assume that the input data is acquired using object-oriented center cropping, while this assumption may not always hold in practice due to the high cost of manual object annotation. Random cropping is a straightforward data pre-processing approach. However, it 1) introduces significant irregularities and incompleteness in the input data and 2) disrupts the coherence and continuity of object boundary regions. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Position transformation and Boundary refinement Network (DPBNet). The core idea is to dynamically adjust the relative position of irregular targets to construct their contextual relationships and prioritize difficult boundary pixels to enhance foreground-background distinction. Specifically, we design a shuffle-then-reorder attention module to adjust the position of disrupted objects in the latent space using dynamic generation ratios, such that the vital dependencies among these random cropping targets could be well captured and preserved. Moreover, to improve the accuracy of boundary localization, we introduce a dual fine-grained boundary loss with scenario-adaptive weights to handle the ambiguity of the dual boundary at a fine-grained level, promoting the clarity and continuity of the obtained results. Extensive experimental results on benchmark dataset have demonstrated that DPBNet consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

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Why Not Use Your Textbook? Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning of Instructional Videos

In this paper, we explore the capability of an agent to construct a logical sequence of action steps, thereby assembling a strategic procedural plan. This plan is crucial for navigating from an initial visual observation to a target visual outcome, as depicted in real-life instructional videos. Existing works have attained partial success by extensively leveraging various sources of information available in the datasets, such as heavy intermediate visual observations, procedural names, or natural language step-by-step instructions, for features or supervision signals. However, the task remains formidable due to the implicit causal constraints in the sequencing of steps and the variability inherent in multiple feasible plans. To tackle these intricacies that previous efforts have overlooked, we propose to enhance the capabilities of the agent by infusing it with procedural knowledge. This knowledge, sourced from training procedure plans and structured as a directed weighted graph, equips the agent to better navigate the complexities of step sequencing and its potential variations. We coin our approach KEPP, a novel Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning system, which harnesses a probabilistic procedural knowledge graph extracted from training data, effectively acting as a comprehensive textbook for the training domain. Experimental evaluations across three widely-used datasets under settings of varying complexity reveal that KEPP attains superior, state-of-the-art results while requiring only minimal supervision.

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Towards Generalizing to Unseen Domains with Few Labels

We approach the challenge of addressing semi-supervised domain generalization (SSDG). Specifically, our aim is to obtain a model that learns domain-generalizable features by leveraging a limited subset of labelled data alongside a substantially larger pool of unlabeled data. Existing domain generalization (DG) methods which are unable to exploit unlabeled data perform poorly compared to semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods under SSDG setting. Nevertheless, SSL methods have considerable room for performance improvement when compared to fully-supervised DG training. To tackle this underexplored, yet highly practical problem of SSDG, we make the following core contributions. First, we propose a feature-based conformity technique that matches the posterior distributions from the feature space with the pseudo-label from the model's output space. Second, we develop a semantics alignment loss to learn semantically-compatible representations by regularizing the semantic structure in the feature space. Our method is plug-and-play and can be readily integrated with different SSL-based SSDG baselines without introducing any additional parameters. Extensive experimental results across five challenging DG benchmarks with four strong SSL baselines suggest that our method provides consistent and notable gains in two different SSDG settings.

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Evaluation of Noise Reduction Methods for Sentence Recognition by Sinhala Speaking Listeners

Noise reduction is a crucial aspect of hearing aids, which researchers have been striving to address over the years. However, most existing noise reduction algorithms have primarily been evaluated using English. Considering the linguistic differences between English and Sinhala languages, including variation in syllable structures and vowel duration, it is very important to assess the performance of noise reduction tailored to the Sinhala language. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis between wavelet transformation and adaptive filters for noise reduction in Sinhala languages. We investigate the performance of ten wavelet families with soft and hard thresholding methods against adaptive filters with Normalized Least Mean Square, Least Mean Square Average Normalized Least Mean Square, Recursive Least Square, and Adaptive Filtering Averaging optimization algorithms along with cepstral and energy-based voice activity detection algorithms. The performance evaluation is done using objective metrics; Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) and a subjective metric; Mean Opinion Score (MOS). A newly recorded Sinhala language audio dataset and the NOIZEUS database by the University of Texas, Dallas were used for the evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChathukiKet/Evaluation-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods

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Multiclass Confidence and Localization Calibration for Object Detection

Albeit achieving high predictive accuracy across many challenging computer vision problems, recent studies suggest that deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to make overconfident predictions, rendering them poorly calibrated. Most of the existing attempts for improving DNN calibration are limited to classification tasks and restricted to calibrating in-domain predictions. Surprisingly, very little to no attempts have been made in studying the calibration of object detection methods, which occupy a pivotal space in vision-based security-sensitive, and safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a new train-time technique for calibrating modern object detection methods. It is capable of jointly calibrating multiclass confidence and box localization by leveraging their predictive uncertainties. We perform extensive experiments on several in-domain and out-of-domain detection benchmarks. Results demonstrate that our proposed train-time calibration method consistently outperforms several baselines in reducing calibration error for both in-domain and out-of-domain predictions. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/bimsarapathiraja/MCCL.

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